macports challenges (not rot)

[Jonathan Stickel]

As soon as I sent it, I regretted using the word "rot". I should have 
used "challenges" or such. Sorry for that.

Maybe it is just my experience with some tickets and PRs that I am 
involved with, and not a problem with Macports generally. Nonetheless, 
maybe some discussion about how best to move stagnant tickets and PRs 
forward might be helpful.

Jonathan



On 12/3/18 10:07, Christopher Jones wrote:
> HI,
> 
> I do not agree with your conclusions below. I see no evidence of macports ‘rotting’ in any way. Nor do the GitHub insight statistics, as far as they go, support anything of the sort.
> 
> The decrease in use of trac since the move to GitHub is in my opinion completely understandable and OK, as much of what it was used for is now better suited by GitHub directly. So this does not surprise me in the slightest.
> 
> The fact there are more open PRs is in my view just a sign that more PRs are being submitted, so the work load in reviewing and applying them is higher. This is perhaps one area we do need to improve, to have more committers taking time to review and merge PRs. This is something that has to a large extent been carried out by  only a handful of people, and thus will be fragile if those people suddenly have less time to devote to it, for whatever reason.
> 
> Chris
> 
>> On 3 Dec 2018, at 4:00 pm, Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I would like to express some concerns about trends I've noticed in the Macports community. I've been a Macports user and contributor for many years. I understand the imperfect nature of open-source projects run by volunteers. Interest and contributions, both by developers and periphery contributors, waxes and wanes. It seems to me that Macports is waning. With the move to github, developer and port-maintainer attention to tickets on trac really dropped off. This was partially made up for by increased attention and fast turnaround with pull requests. Recently, even pull requests are languishing. Reasonable fixes are ignored, or, if problems with the contributions are identified by developers and maintainers, the problems are pointed out with no effort to provide constructive input.
>>
>> I try to help where and when I can. When something is not working for me, I try my best to find a fix and contribute a pull request. I also respond in a reasonable time to tickets and PRs for ports for which I am maintainer. I think this is quite reasonable and the best I can do considering my paying job. I know that I do not have enough time to act as a developer, and so I am not asking for that.
>>
>> So where is Macports headed? I think the core architecture and systems of Macports are well built. It just needs a little more attention. How can we achieve that? Has Homewbrew simply siphoned off too much user and developer base? I don't know.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jonathan
>